


the path you take

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Prompt: "Choosing your own exile", i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:33:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23794684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Four reflections on and in exile.
Relationships: WV & PM & AR & WQ
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11
Collections: Anonymous





	the path you take

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Fail Fandom Anon, in a 100 words prompt thread.

He doesn't know what to do with himself now, wandering the sand with shaky legs and aching feet, trudging over dunes taller than the battlefield's hills and a hundred times as treacherous. Nothing grows here, not even a lone cactus or something low-lying and small in the earth. The sand is pristine and barren, and covers his tracks like a vast, swallowing void.

Something rusty pokes out of the ground like a landmark, and in his hands it's blood blossoming in the water, filling the river with red in the aftermath of his deadly foolishness. He stands for too long staring at it, until the sand begins to pile windswept around his ankles and he has to shake it off to keep walking.

He buries the rusty scrap again, leaving the top sticking out straight up like a tiny spire, to mark a grave that does not exist and never will.

The banner once shone bright yellow in the light of Skaia, a rousing symbol of patriotism in a predestined failure of a war. She cut it cleanly from its fittings, slicing away the last binding threads from the pole with her traitor's blade, watching it glint black as the archagent's carapace as she worked.

She knows the outline of the path she must take, but not the specifics. The wasteland she glimpsed in the clouds once is vast, and she can tell she has a while yet to go by the hint of color left in her tattered exile's garb. The future self she saw wore rags bleached fully grey by the unforgiving alien sun.

When that day comes, though, she will find her queen, and she will apologize for what she had to do.

It's thankless work, but someone has to do it. The sacrilege lies still and unbothered in the wastes, except for when he makes his rounds. Originally, he made patrols around the broader perimeter, but over the years the radius shrank down to the tower itself, the border markers bent and crumpled from the weight of time, wind, and dust. The spare rolls of tape ran out, and the pile of useful artifacts grew smaller and smaller.

Some nights, he wonders if it was worth it, a shadow of doubt stalking him into his dreams. He forces it aside, clinging to purpose, a machine in motion that'll break down into nothing if it stops. He has a duty, however self-imposed.

He hopes that young man from the lab is all right.

She has walked far. The path is long and meandering, and she knows every inch of it; each step she places into the sand will land exactly where it belongs. She can't say she had a choice, but it doesn't (won't) matter. She can see it in her memory of what will be, as surely as she knows the rules of the game she's soon to leave behind.

Ahead, though, at the end of the road, lies a great unknown. A tiny thread of fear ripples through her and quickens her heart at the thought of walking out of the domain of Skaia's light, but she smooths it with a thought. She will remain serene and composed, every bit a queen, for the remaining days and nights until she relinquishes her crown.

Her retinue stays behind. They will find their own way. In truth, she is a queen no longer: her kingdom is shrapnel, her people decimated, the remains reduced to stragglers and wanderers, trapped in a new world or erased from the old.

She takes the first step into the dunes alone, and the journey begins.

There are four of them around the campfire now, the scattered scraps of two dead kingdoms. Their edges have frayed and their colors have faded, but their stomachs are full and spirits high. A questant, a renegade, a mendicant, and a vagabond sit together under the starlight, and for a few short hours, they are a patchwork kingdom all their own.


End file.
